How do we make the invisible visible? How can we see the unseen? We could get fancy and I could give this practice a name—the practice of seeing with the great wisdom eye of liberating compassion. In plainer language, in diversity and inclusion work, it begins with looking around the room and noting who’s here and who isn’t here. It’s a practice of mindful awareness.

For example, in the Zen Buddhist Temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I started training in 1982, we were located in an old house that we were renovating. There were steps that led from the street level up to a porch, then a narrow doorway with a threshold that you had to step over, and then an entryway area that took you up to the meditation hall and other parts of the temple. But there was no wheelchair ramp. Therefore, by definition, we never had any people coming to meditate or practice with us in wheelchairs or who had severe mobility limitations. We never saw them in the meditation hall. Was it because there were people in that city in wheelchairs who didn’t want to come? We didn’t know, and we didn’t find out at that point. Since that time, a ramp has been built, and it has become a diverse and thriving sangha. Sometimes it takes time. We’ll never get to our goals unless we have in mind that we want to become more inclusive. 

Usually, when we ask who isn’t here, someone will be confused and ask, “How can I see who isn’t in the room?” We can extend “the room” to all the places we go on a regular basis, on vacations, and special trips, as well. We can look around any time and ask ourselves how many people appear to be here in the room. I want to emphasize the word “appear.” We can’t always know how others self-identify, but as humans we do look around, even if we’re not aware of it, and we’re constantly making these assessments.

How many people here appear to be people of color, younger, older, in wheelchairs or scooters? How many people here appear to be women, men, [non-binary], or maybe I can’t tell how they may self-identify in terms of gender? How many people here are of various body shapes and sizes? Or who appears to me to be low, medium, or higher income? I want to stop and emphasize that we’re invoking a mind state—and this is important as we’re beginning to ask these questions—that is spacious, gentle, compassionate, and contains friendliness and lovingkindness. As we begin to practice seeing the unseen, we’re going to get a peek of how much we don’t know, which can be unsettling, irritating, or just plain scary. We’re also surfacing our unconscious assumptions, thoughts we’re thinking that we don’t know we’re thinking, beliefs that we have held our entire lives. It’s likely that we’ve never examined these beliefs because they are so core to who we think we are and how we’ve been raised—how we’ve been conditioned. 

We need to invoke a mind-state that’s an antidote to whatever anxiety may arise, an attitude of gentleness, kindness, openness, curiosity, and interest. If you have kids or work with kids, you know that it’s natural as human beings to be curious about so many things, especially when we’re younger. We can practice metta, or lovingkindness, for ourselves: may I be safe, healthy, happy, peaceful, joyous, and at ease. Then we can proceed on as though we’re contemplating this koan. We’re talking about building inclusive sanghas, and as we know, the sangha is the third of what’s called the three jewels: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. We go to the sangha for refuge, we go to the Buddha for refuge, we go to the dharma for refuge. So how can we create sanghas that are true refuges—harbors in the storm, safe and welcoming spaces of healing and renewal of spirit—in the samsaric world?

Ask yourself this without demanding a quick answer to emerge, but go deeply into the question. Of the three refuges, I’d say that sangha is the most difficult. It presents the most problems—not that we don’t wrestle with the Buddha and the dharma, but the sangha is made up of real people. They’re our communities. They’re our friends. They become our spiritual family. And that’s where the rubber meets the road in a lot of our practice. It’s hard to be serene and spiritually wonderful when people we find annoying, or difficult, or who we feel just aren’t harmonious with our group for whatever reason show up. In fact, we may really struggle with accepting others as our sangha members when we feel that they are just so different from whoever we are. At that point we need to step back and take a look and ask ourselves, “What is my dharma practice about really?” Many of us will say, “I want to become a calm, centered, wise, and compassionate person,” but there’s another way of looking at this as well.

In 1985, I was on pilgrimage with my original Zen teacher and we were passing through San Francisco. Along the way on this pilgrimage—which went from Mexico City all the way up through Texas, the West Coast, across the Rockies, through Colorado, and then back to the Midwest—we visited as many Buddhist groups of every sect and lineage that we could find. At a Chinese temple in San Francisco’s Chinatown, we met a Chinese monk who only spoke a limited amount of English. I remember distinctly that he said, “I became a monk because I wanted to learn about the world. I wanted to learn about the world.” 

We need to ask: How reflective are our sanghas, or spiritual communities, of the entire world? How can we learn? How can we see more deeply, and grow spiritually more and more? Very simply, how can we learn about the world?

♦

Further resources listed in this Dharma Talk include: “Making the Invisible Visible: Healing Racism in our sanghas, in our Buddhist Communities (2000) and “Dharma Color and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism,” edited by Hilda Gutiérrez Baldoquín, (Parallax Press, 2004)

The post Seeing the Unseen appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For me, growing up Buddhist in Northern California in the early 1960s was sometimes difficult. There were very few Buddhists around, and many Americans looked at Buddhism as some kind of weird Asian cult. Fortunately, things have changed enormously since then. Buddhism is today much better known and more widely practiced. As the Harvard professor Diana Eck, an expert on contemporary American religions, declared in 1993, “Buddhism is now an American religion.”

Professor Eck observed that Buddhists have been in America since around 1850, and their numbers have increased greatly over time. Surveys indicate that today over 30 million people, or close to one-tenth of the US population, identify themselves as Buddhist; read and engage in Buddhist spirituality but don’t identify themselves as members of a religion; or have been strongly influenced by Buddhism. Which taken together means that Buddhism is, whether in numbers or influence, one of the fastest-growing religions in America.

While the vast majority of the approximately 500 million Buddhists in the world live in Asia, one fascinating aspect of Buddhism in America is that, for the first time in nearly the entire 2,600 years of Buddhism’s history, all the major Buddhist denominations in the world today coexist in one country. In many large American (and Canadian) cities there are more different kinds of Buddhism than are found anywhere in Asia, including Bangkok, Taipei, Seoul, and Kyoto. In the Los Angeles area, for example, close to 100 different Buddhist traditions—representing virtually all the world’s main denominations—find a home. Whereas in Asia, Buddhists from different countries have rarely known, or even known of, each other, in Los Angeles you may find temples with roots in Thailand, Korea, and Vietnam located near each other, sometimes even on the same street. For me, this trend provides a new and exciting opportunity for all Buddhists to learn from and better understand each other.

Despite the promising demographics, and despite Buddhism’s high level of cultural visibility and accessibility, few introductory books seem to address youths and young adults. Having been myself an American Buddhist youth, and having raised three young Buddhists as well, I had long felt there was a need for easy-to-understand introductory books for this audience. And so a few years ago I set about writing one. The book, Jewels, was published in the spring of 2020. After its release, a friend pointed out that because American Buddhism includes so many different communities, the book might also be of value to Buddhists who know a great deal about their particular corner of American Buddhism but not much about its full range. It is with this in mind that I’ve adapted sections of the book for this article.

In America, for the first time in nearly 2,600 years, all the major Buddhist denominations in the world today coexist in one country.

I chose Jewels as the title of the book because in Buddhism jewels are used as a metaphor for something of immense spiritual preciousness. A person is considered to have become a Buddhist when they accept as the basic foundation of their life the “three jewels,” referring to the Buddha (the fully awakened person), the dharma (the Buddhist teachings), and the sangha (the community of fellow Buddhists). For Buddhists of all schools, the three jewels are the object of ultimate reliance and respect. This imagery of jewels also can help explain how these divergent schools can live in harmony.

Buddhist teachings tell us to see all living beings as precious jewels. You and I, along with all beings, are like jewels that are linked together in the vast web of the universe, each jewel reflecting all the others. Each jewel has an outer and inner aspect.

The outer jewels are talked about through the metaphor of Indra’s Net of Jewels. Indra’s net is known in East Asia through the teachings of the Huayen school of Buddhism, which is based on the Flower Garland Sutra and related writings. The metaphor is now often cited by Buddhists in North America and beyond.

Picture an expansive net extending endlessly in all directions throughout the universe. At each of its nodes hangs a shimmering jewel. Each jewel is connected to all the other jewels, even to those so distant that they are not even visible from one location.No jewel shines by itself. Each one needs the light from the other jewels to shine. At the same time, a jewel does not just receive light; it also gives out light. Although each jewel may illuminate nearby jewels with greater intensity than it does distant ones, each shines on all the others, no matter how faintly. They need each other and help each other. They are mutually linked, interconnected, and interdependent.

No two jewels are exactly the same. Despite being countless in number, each jewel is unique in its shape, size, color, and texture. Each of us is one of these jewels. We are dependent on others, yet we also contribute to others. Such is the nature of our existence, which includes our relationships with our family, our friends, our community, the nation, the international community, and the natural world. Each jewel has worth and value simply for existing and for being a part of this net of jewels.

As one of the jewels in the web, I am connected to the countless other jewels that illuminate and support me. This is the outer jewel. At the same time, there lies within each one of us an inner jewel, waiting to shine forth to help us realize Buddhism’s aim of awakening, overcoming suffering and manifesting joy, satisfaction, peace of mind, and gratitude—its aim, in other words, of achieving happiness.

To understand the inner aspect of the jewels, we can turn to a famous parable from another important Buddhist scripture,the Lotus Sutra. The parable tells of a poor man who visited the house of a rich friend, where he was wined and dined. The poor man got drunk and fell asleep. While his friend slept, the rich man sewed a priceless jewel into the lining of his poor friend’s clothes. The poor man awoke and set out on a long journey, unaware of the jewel he now carried. One day, by chance, the poor man ran into his rich friend, who saw that his friend’s life continued to be so hard and realized he hadn’t discovered the jewel. When the rich man told his friend, the poor man was overjoyed. He had discovered at last that precious something that had all along been in his possession.

The jewel, of course, symbolizes our spiritual potential to become happier and wiser. We all have that inner jewel, and the teachings of the Buddha are meant to help us discover that for ourselves. Our task is to take hold of that jewel, polish it, and let it shine forth.

All Buddhist schools teach the path to awakening, seeing that we are all jewels. But different traditions present the teachings differently. In America, where there are so many denominations, it can be hard to gain a full picture of what American Buddhism even looks like. To help understand this, I find it useful to categorize the various kinds of Buddhism into four main groups.

The first group consists of older Asian American Buddhist communities. They started their temples in the mid to late 1800s and are mostly of Chinese and Japanese origin. Today, because they are mostly third-, fourth- and fifth-generation Americans, their temple activities and services are held in English.

Since the mid 1960s, newer Asian American Buddhist communities have formed in the United States as more people have immigrated from Cambodia, Korea, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Because these communities still have a large percentage of first-generation members, temple activities and services are often held in their respective native languages. However, English is being used with increasing frequency as the second and third generations come of age. For newer and older Asian American Buddhist communities alike, temples serve as hubs for both religious and cultural life.

The next group consists of those who were for the most part not born into Buddhist families but converted to Buddhism as adults and whose main practice is sitting meditation. They are predominately of European descent, though there is a substantial and increasing membership of people of color. In general terms, members of this third group belong to Zen, Theravada (particularly vipassana, or insight lineages), or Tibetan traditions, which are centered on meditation practices. The immense popularity over the past decade or so of mindfulness practices has definitely increased the numbers belonging to this group.

The fourth group is made up of convert Buddhists whose main practice is chanting. The majority of this group are affiliated with Soka Gakkai International, or SGI, which is a denomination of Nichiren Buddhism. Like that of other Nichiren Buddhists, the main practice is reciting the Odaimoku, “the great sacred title” of the Lotus Sutra, which in SGI is pronounced “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.” One of the largest Buddhist organizations in America today, SGI is also the most racially diverse organization, with a membership that includes large numbers of Asian American, Latino, African American, and white participants.

We might understand the rapid growth of American Buddhism by borrowing from economics the concept of supply and demand. “Demand” here refers to those factors that “pulled” or “welcomed” Buddhism. Several stand out: First, Americans value religion to a much greater degree than do people in most other developed countries. Religion tends to be seen as a “good thing,” providing a spiritual and ethical foundation for living. This is especially apparent in the raising of children. Also, Americans tend to hold pastors, priests, rabbis, and other religious professionals in high regard. Religious leaders often serve as leaders in the general community beyond their particular churches, mosques, temples, or synagogues. The value we place on religion is so much a part of American society that we often take it for granted and scarcely notice it.

A second “demand” factor is societal openness. In the 1960s, American society’s attitude began to shift toward greater openness toward religions other than Protestantism. For example, when John F. Kennedy campaigned for president in 1960, suspicion about his being Catholic was the cause of significant opposition. But in 2020, President Joe Biden’s Catholicism was most often seen as a strength because it signaled that he is a person of sincere religious conviction, regardless of sect.

Changes in immigration laws in 1965 further fostered religious diversity, and thus openness, because of the arrival of more people from non-Western countries, including Buddhist immigrants from Asia.

Within this atmosphere of openness, Buddhism has come to be seen less as a weird “Oriental” cult, as it was when I was growing up. In fact, as the number of people interested in spiritual matters increased, it was often thought, however naively, that “spiritual Asia” was superior to the “materialistic West.” Many such people were attracted to Buddhism because they found in it a response to the spiritual needs of an industrialized culture.

The third factor follows on this, and it has to do with change in the very nature of religion in America. Surveys have shown that Americans have in increasing numbers become more attracted to spirituality than to what is often called “organized religion,” meaning religion as centered on membership in institutions such as synagogues, temples, and mosques. The phrase “spiritual but not religious” is often used to describe such people.

In addressing the spiritual needs of so many, Buddhism has become a diverse and multifaceted part of the American religious landscape.

Turning to the supply side of Buddhism, we can identify certain qualities that have appealed to the spiritual and religious needs of Americans. In particular, Buddhism fits in with the trend of valuing a spirituality that stresses personal experience. That is, you could say, Buddhist teachings show us that we have been carrying around a precious jewel all along.

One such quality that Buddhism offers is its attitude toward the suffering we all deal with in facing life’s difficulties. Buddhism sees difficulties such as sickness, loss, disappointment, and death as a natural part of life and not something to try to deny. Suffering is something that needs to be understood, accepted, and turned into a springboard for living a fuller and more meaningful life.

Second, Buddhism seeks to speak to the unique experience of each individual. (After all, no two jewels are the same.) Because of this, it can be a valuable path to self-understanding. Many Americans like to feel that they are free to question religious teachings and to make up their own minds about them, and Buddhism not only allows for this but even encourages it. This is the reason for the popularity of the Kalama Sutta, in which the Buddha says:

Don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, “This contemplative is our teacher.” When you know for yourselves that, “These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted and carried out, lead to welfare and to happiness”—then you should enter and remain in them.
–Anguttara Nikaya 3.66, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Probably the number one reason for the growth of American Buddhism is found in the popularity of meditation. This third aspect offered by Buddhism includes practices that many find easy to learn, mentally therapeutic, and spiritually empowering and liberating. Sitting meditation as taught in the Zen, Theravada, and Tibetan schools has been especially attractive to converts.

The American sociologist of religion Wade Clark Roof describes spirituality as “personal experience tailored to the individual’s own quests.” Spirituality, he writes, is associated with five key terms: connectedness, unity, peace, harmony, and centeredness. Buddhism as presented in America attracts people looking to experience these qualities in their lives. In addressing the spiritual needs of so many, Buddhism has become a demographically diverse and multifaceted part of the American religious landscape. To me, this is very exciting.

Like the jewels in Indra’s net, each community, each lineage shines a light on the rest, each helping and being helped by the others to glow brighter.

The post The Land of Many Dharmas appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For all the talk of an emerging American Buddhism that embraces diversity and inclu­sion, the reality falls short of the ideal. People of color still often find them­selves the lone representative in a medi­tation hall or segregated in “people of color” retreats. The LBGTQ community fares no better. Women, as teachers and practitioners, are more visible and influ­ential these days, but the hierarchy in many Buddhist sanghas remains white, heterosexual, male—and, particularly in Tibetan Buddhism, bound by centu­ries-old lineages and monastic forms.

That may be about to change. Two American teachers in the Kagyu tradition—Lama Rod Owens and Repa Dorje Odzer (aka Justin von Bujdoss)—have launched a virtual prac­tice community, Bhumisparsha, that is turning Vajrayana on its head. Eschew­ing the top-down organization of most Buddhist sanghas, Bhumisparsha bills itself as an egalitarian “safe space” for those who have felt marginalized or unwel­come in traditional dharma settings. Separating Vajrayana from its Tibetan cultural trappings, Lama Rod and Justin, as they’re known, are evolving a dharma more accessible to Westerners and more responsive to the growing pool of prac­titioners underserved in today’s multi­cultural, gender-fluid, #MeToo world.

Bhumisparsha—Sanskrit for “touch­ing the earth”—refers to the mudra, or gesture, made by the Buddha on the night of his enlightenment when he asked the earth to support his awakening. “Touching the earth is about coming back to the body, to the ground of our experience,” Lama Rod says. Through tantric practice, Justin adds, “we confront all the layers of our being—our identity, our appearance, our relationship to society, and all the experience that arises in relationship to that: tentativeness, fear, anxiety, not being in the in crowd.” He calls Bhumisparsha a “supportive container” that allows a practitioner “to go deep in a balanced way.”

“Safety” has become a cultural cliché, but for dharma practitioners whose race, sexual orientation, or gender identity has made them a target of prejudice, abuse, or clumsy efforts by sanghas to be politically correct, feeling safe isn’t an abstract concern. “There’s a difference between safety and discomfort,” Lama Rod notes. To him, feeling safe rests on trust that a community is truly inclusive and welcoming. “Safety allows for a sense of protection so students can,” Justin adds, “authentically engage the dharma.”

Related: Buddhism’s Postmodern Age

If anyone could upend tradition and create something like Bhumisparsha, it would be these two. A core value of Bhumisparsha is “disrupting” systems of patriarchy, misogyny, power, and dominance that stir up conflict in Buddhist sanghas. “I’m a black, queer, Southern American Buddhist, so I’m already disrupting heteronormativity and white supremacy and all that,” explains Lama Rod, who feels a duty to inspire others like him.

The path for Lama Rod began with a traditional three-year silent retreat at Kagyu Thubten Chöling Monastery in upstate New York and ordination by the late Lama Norlha Rinpoche, who encouraged him to teach: “He said I could reach people that he couldn’t.” Lama Rod ran the KTC affiliate in Washington, DC, before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he earned a master’s degree in Buddhist ministry from Harvard Divinity School, with a focus on identity, social change, and spiritual practice. He is now a teacher and teacher trainer with Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, a program for teens. An outspoken activist and author, Lama Rod is a popular and peripatetic teacher who at 39 is a leading dharma voice for Generation X.

The community bills itself as a safe space for those who have felt unwelcome in traditional dharma settings.

Justin is Lama Rod’s polar opposite—a “cisgender white male” (that is, his gender identity matches his birth sex), who is a 44-year-old husband, father of three, and longtime New Yorker—but he’s just as committed to engaged Buddhism and social justice. Justin studied with teachers in India and Sikkim, and was ordained as a repa—lay tantric yogin—in the Karma Kamstang tradition by Goshir Gyaltsab Rinpoche. He worked as a home hospice chaplain and served as the director and resident lama at New York Tsurphu Goshir Dharma Center in Brooklyn, New York, until it closed in 2017. He taught meditation to inmates as a volunteer at Rikers Island before becoming the first staff chaplain for the New York City Department of Correction. Now Justin develops meditation programs for officers and guards; he also ministers to department staff and designs health initiatives.

Lama Rod and Justin met on Facebook in 2013, bonding over frustration with the structure of traditional Vajrayana. Other practitioners struggling in traditional sanghas began to seek them out, and over the next few years they discussed the need for change. Both serve on the advisory council of the biennial Gen-X Buddhist Teachers Sangha Conference, and at the 2017 conference in Crestone, Colorado, they decided to stop talking and take action.

They first announced their plans on Lama Rod’s Facebook page in February 2018. Now, more than a year later, Bhumisparsha is an established virtual sangha, with a website, a following, and future plans that tentatively include a yearlong online course on tantra. There are no plans, however, for a brick-and-mortar center anytime soon. More important than building a center is “creating a healthy, sustainable community of practitioners,” Lama Rod says.

There could be no better demonstration of Bhumisparsha’s mission than its first retreat, held over four days last December at the Thomasville Buddhist Center in Thomasville, North Carolina. The 21 participants included 9 people of color and ranged in age from 23 to 68 and in sexual orientation from heterosexual to queer, bisexual, and pansexual. There were more women than men, plus a few gender nonconformists. Billed as “Healing the Heart of the South,” the retreat explored racism, racial violence, and community-based trauma—not the usual Buddhist fare. The central practice, chöd, was also an unexpected choice.

A rigorous Tibetan Buddhist method for cutting through ego, chöd is often practiced in cemeteries and other fearsome places. It turns out there were plenty of ghosts for practitioners to work with: behind the center was a former plantation.

Early buzz about Bhumisparsha is encouraging, but Lama Rod and Justin remain cautious about the future. They insist on calling the sangha “a huge experiment,” inviting both input and criticism to help it grow. Neither intends to be the sole guiding force going forward. Both plan to keep their day jobs, and as the community evolves, leadership and teaching will be shared. For the moment, Bhumisparsha is content to be a refuge—albeit one that isn’t afraid to disrupt the status quo.

Correction (06/11): An earlier version of this article stated that Lama Rod Owens was the guiding teacher for the Boston Radical Dharma Collective at the time of publication. But he has not held that position in more than a year, and the group has since dissolved.

The post Dharma For All appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

City: Charlottesville, Virginia
Tradition: Insight Meditation (Vipassana)
Year Founded: 1996
Number of Members: 175
Meeting Place: Rented room at an adult care center

Tricycle talks with Jeffrey Fracher, the president of Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville (IMCC) and one of the sangha’s 13 teachers:

You have a large sangha—approximately 175 members—for a modest- sized city of 60,000. What are your regular offerings, and how many people show up? Our regular meeting is on Tuesday night. We have a 40-minute sit, followed by announcements and housekeeping, then a 35- or 40-minute dharma talk by whoever led the meditation that night. About half of our teachers went through Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Leaders program; the others have trained with Tara Brach. We probably average 40 to 60 people on any given Tuesday night.

We offer four “introduction to meditation” classes a year. We also have two weekday sits downtown at a nonprofit community healing center called Common Ground. It’s quite a distance from our regular meeting place at an adult care center. About 10 or 20 people come, and they have sort of become their own sangha.

We also hold two residential retreats a year at a center in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

How did your sangha respond to the “Unite the Right Rally,” which brought thousands of white nationalists and white supremacists as well as counterprotesters to Charlottesville in August? We became part of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, a group of faith communities that came together on both days of the rally, bearing witness to the violence. It was powerful. Being on the front lines goes to our own mission of trying to relieve suffering and push back on hatred. It got people off their rear ends and wanting to do something about this whole thing that descended on our quiet little city. In addition, we had a bunch of sits during the rally at our downtown center.

The rally protested the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  at weekend, crowds marched through the street with torches, chanting things like “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us.” There were violent clashes between the white nationalists and the counterprotesters. A man drove a car into a crowd, killing one counterprotester and injuring 19 others. A helicopter monitoring the scene also crashed that day, killing two state troopers. How did these tragic events affect the work your sangha is doing? About a week or two after the Klan and the Nazis were here, we brought in David Campt, an author and speaker who teaches a “white ally toolkit”—a way to engage with white people on racial issues without offending, scaring, shaming, or judging them. We had about 100 people come. But this is still within the realm of dealing more with our white peers. Some members are more engaged in the minority communities here, but we’ve got a lot of work to do in that area.

After the Klan was here, the police department contacted me about doing something with the officers. Some of the young ones especially had been traumatized and subjected to horrible stuff during the rally. We’ve been teaching the officers basic meditation and emotional resilience, including how to breathe when you’re in a high-intensity situation.

Did you see any breakthroughs beyond your sangha after the rally? Charlottesville has a tendency to be self-congratulatory when it comes to how liberal we are, but the truth is that not much has changed in terms of racial dynamics. The rally brought a lot of people off the sidelines and engaged in more dialogue with folks in lower-income and minority communities. But that is very much in its infancy.

About three years ago, my wife and I moved from a typical white neighborhood downtown to a predominantly black neighborhood. We have Section 8 housing next door and public housing across the street. This isn’t just me; others have made an effort to get to know people and try to understand what the experience of growing up black in the South and Charlottesville in particular is like. So this is an ongoing priority. It’s also an ongoing challenge.

How diverse is your sangha? We don’t have the degree of diversity that we’d like. Our members are largely middle- and upper-middle-class white, skewed toward the slightly older demographic, although we have started to get more young people. We do have a lot of University of Virginia faculty, staff, and students who participate, as well as a fairly active LGBTQ contingent.

I think we’re not unique in this way, and it’s something we’re actively trying to address.

How so? We’ve had Ruth King, an African American Insight Meditation teacher who does race awareness training, come six times to work with our sangha. Her message to us was this: “You’ve got to do your own work as white people. Don’t tell us what we need. Don’t try to fix us. You need to fix yourself.” Out of her trainings we’ve developed about ten small “White Awake” groups of people who work on racial justice and outreach. This has borne fruit in terms of raising awareness among white folks about the level of racial oppression all over the country, and here as well, since Charlottesville had its own terrible racial history, even before the Klan came.

—Wendy Joan Biddlecombe, Web Editor

Tricycle wants to learn about your sangha! Write news@tricycle.org to be considered.

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According to the Pali Canon, the Buddha exhorted his most accomplished disciples to go forth and make his teachings known to anyone who genuinely wanted to put an end to suffering, and whose karma had turned them toward the path. But what happens when a large proportion of seekers never connect with the teachings, because the barriers of poverty and structural racism in their society are so high that the path remains obscured? Do we chalk it up to karma and attend only to those with the means and wherewithal to show up on their own?

For Harrison Blum, the director of religious and spiritual life at Emerson College in Boston, the answer is emphatically “no.” In 2014, as part of his studies at Harvard Divinity School, Blum launched the Mindfulness Allies Project (MAP) to begin tackling what he calls our “mindfulness equity” problem. With MAP, he has led pilot meditation and mindfulness workshops for low-income Bostonians, many of them people of color. Participants learn about the classes through community centers where they access social services where Blum had established enduring relationships. The classes include onsite childcare and a meal afterward, all at no cost—requisites that make six weeks of meditation instruction a workable undertaking for people who struggle to make ends meet, rather than an impossible luxury.

This fall, Blum is also launching eMINDFUL, a mindfulness training and outreach initiative that will prepare Emerson students to work with residents of a nearby homeless shelter.

What inspired you to form the Mindfulness Allies Project?
In 2010, I participated in the fourth iteration of Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Leader training. That year, 38 percent of the class self-identified as a person of color. In previous programs, they’d had had an average of six percent. That group was specifically designed to have more racial diversity and the instruction incorporated anti-racism and cultural sensitivity training. Then, in 2014, I attended the Symposium for Contemplative Studies and was struck that just five percent of the 300 talks mentioned race and class as subjects in the application or training of mindfulness practices.

So I started feeling like we have this problem of mindfulness equity. Maybe it’s not as dire as water equity or healthcare equity. But when you look at the fact that 60 to 90 percent of all physician visits are for stress-related disorders, then it is actually a healthcare issue, a life expectancy issue. It’s also, of course, a happiness issue.

It’s no secret that most American dharma centers are mostly white and upper-middle class. 
Absolutely. And we are also seeing an increase in attendance at retreats specifically for people of color, and of people of color within mixed racial groups. Recently, the Insight Meditation Society celebrated the first time they surpassed 30 percent registration of people of color in their three-month retreat. Still, the fact remains that if you’re poor, a person of color, or both, chances are you have less access to mindfulness teachings.

I used to go to the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center’s Wednesday night talks and hear announcements about the Friday night people of color group. I’d think, “Oh, that’s nice.” But it took my own education to make me start asking questions like “if there’s a people of color group, why isn’t there also a white awareness group? Where is the ally group?”

You’ve talked about how most centers embrace an approach of “inviting in” rather than “going out” to engage people of various backgrounds. Is that what you set out to do with Mindfulness Allies?
Exactly. Diversity efforts have largely been focused on bringing in rather than going out to create real relationships. To the extent that dharma centers leave their walls to engage in outreach service, the majority of that service is material aid. And that’s very good. I’m not saying that mindfulness cures homelessness. But if we have this practice, with good data showing it supports psychological and physical wellness, let’s share it. Let’s leave our shoes on, go out, and share what we specialize in.

What’s the resistance to doing this work?
I think inertia is a big hurdle. I mailed letters of introduction and the invitation to participate in MAP, including documentation of the positive findings of my first MAP pilot, to two meditation retreat centers and six major urban meditation centers. Out of those eight, only two responded, and none expressed interest in learning more or collaborating. At least one of these urban centers has an annual budget of over $100,000, and a MAP 6-week pilot costs just $400 and 45 hours of volunteered time.

What do you attribute that disinterest to?
In some ways, Western Buddhism, particularly the Insight Meditation tradition, came into its own as part of a deliberate retreat from activism. Some of the spiritual movements and centers that were forming in the 1970s and 80s were stepping away from civic or social engagement. I’m not saying that’s true down to a person, but I believe it was a theme. Happily, I think we’re seeing that pendulum swinging back now.

The Buddha did not condone proselytizing. How does creating access differ from that?
As the suttas tell it, the Buddha was concerned with people who were sick. He told his disciples, “you need to take care of each other.” People suffering from stress and stress-related disease surround our dharma centers. That’s why people seek them out.

But the structures that make it possible for people to come and learn and practice are not in place. The fact that there was childcare available, and a free meal afterward, during the pilot classes I taught was in response to the very things that people listed as obstacles preventing them from going to the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, which was half a mile from where I was teaching these classes. One of the students, a single mother earning less than $15,000 a year, knew for years that there was meditation taught in her neighborhood, but was never able to do it because of various structural obstacles.

You’ve connected dance with mindfulness practice, and you’ve edited a book about the relationship between dance and dharma. How have you used dance as a teaching tool?
Movement and dance are fun, they’re somewhat universal, and they’re very good at breaking the ice and building community. Someone might not sign up for a meditation class, but they might try a mindfulness-based hip hop class I’ve taught at the YMCA.

Every single intro to mindfulness class I’ve taught—and I’ve taught hundreds—I begin by teaching Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk. The Moonwalk and mindfulness are quite similar: they both ask us to re-pattern relationships, the Moonwalk with movement and mindfulness with perception. The Moonwalk asks you to balance with less surface area—to balance on a foot with the heel lifted. Mindfulness helps you to grasp less at what you want and push less against what you don’t want. Another similarity is that they’re both easy to talk about and hard to do.

How do you square extracting the teachings on mindfulness from the larger whole of Buddhist practice?
For me, it’s not an issue to take the teachings from the Satipatthana Sutta out of a Buddhist context. The basic idea is how we can relate intimately to the truth of our experience and how can we reduce resistance to the way things are—that is a lot of what Buddhism is about.

We don’t need to proselytize. At the end of my courses, I give students The Power of Now [by Eckhart Tolle], which is not a Buddhist book. I give people resources on local centers that include an Insight Meditation center, but also a local Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher, as well as a local centering prayer organization.

The responses you collected from students in the pilot were very poignant. What do you think was the most significant impact of the courses?
In the first class, I asked people to share their names and what brought them, and several broke down crying, saying how hard their daily life was. That’s a tremendous amount of suffering that people are walking around with, with no supportive container to hold it. But if taking the class could shift that even a little bit for someone, then that’s significant.

Obviously, we’re not going to change structural racism in this course. But one of the very low-income women of color who participated said she was able to change her relationship to chronic pain and better attend doctor visits as a result of the class. For her, leaving the apartment and following through on a doctor’s appointment was a huge victory. I’m not going to dissect the many ways being a poor woman of color is a challenge, but if our class can actually support her in going to a doctor’s visit, that’s an important outcome to an issue that’s racially based.

How do you hope to move forward with the Mindfulness Allies Project?
I basically really need collaborators. I have a detailed guideline on my website for how to set up a MAP pilot, and I think it’s a model that can be adapted to different cities and organizations. If just five meditation centers were to sign on, we’d have a great amount of information that could be published and shared and we could build from there. But we need buy-in to see if it’s a good enough model, and if it is, what it looks like when it’s actually enacted on a broader scale.

You have written that dharma centers have a moral imperative to do this kind of work. Do you think that everyone who gets involved with Buddhist practice or meditation has the same imperative?
In a word, yes. For example, it’s not a requirement that everyone be vegetarian, but maybe there are certain things, like being a vegetarian, that are good to try to do if you care about alleviating suffering. I’m a fan of dharma teachers supporting vegetarian choices. I’m a fan of dharma teachers saying it’s important to help other people, not just yourself, in practice. Aren’t we about getting beyond the circumference of our ego’s needs?

The post Tackling The Mindfulness Equity Problem appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A few years ago I attended a gathering of mostly white Buddhists, where I was met with a stunning lack of community. It seemed to me that there was very little warmth and little awareness of the need for intimacy. At the time, I remember wondering why it had felt so cold to me but apparently not to others: Was it that I was one of the few people of color there? Or was it the fact that in a group of meditation-centric practitioners, the tradition in which I practice—Nichiren Shu—was little understood and didn’t seem to have a place in the discussion?

The Western Buddhist sangha has been engaged in significant conversations about the issue of diversity for some time now. Those conversations, the architects of which have been largely those engaged in meditation-centric practice, have focused on ethnic diversity, specifically on its lack and why such lack exists. As someone who has always been engaged in Buddhist practice based on ritual and tradition—because they speak to me in a way that silent meditation does not—I’ve found these conversations so narrowly focused as to create a kind of tunnel vision. There is even a bit of arrogance implicit in them about what Buddhism in the West really looks like. It seems to me that in our search for diversity, we Buddhists have been asking the wrong questions. The world of Buddhism in the West is actually quite diverse and has always been so. It has a lot to offer anyone if only it is sought out.

I was born in postwar Japan to an African American soldier and a young Japanese woman from a family of Nichiren Shu practitioners. I was unaware of my mother’s Buddhist background for more than 50 years, and was raised as a Protestant in the United States Army system. When I became a Buddhist at age 13, my cultural context was a unique environment formed in those American spaces by Japanese women representing various age, class, religious, educational, economic, rank, and racial differences. These women were war brides, limited by language and their own alienness, who banded together to support each other in an environment both strange and hostile.

My greatest memory and treasure of those early years was the time spent with these women as they shared their struggles, their victories and defeats, their hopes and dreams, and all the stories of their lives. This was how they taught Buddhism, not through books (there were none in English at that time), but through their own examples. Everything they encountered and endured became the fuel for their Buddhist practice.

These women married into American families of European, Latino, African, and Asian descent, further deepening the differences among them. Their stories of surviving and overcoming racism, domestic violence, their husbands’ alcoholism, poverty, solitude (when their husbands shipped overseas), their own longing for home, depression, regret, and simply being Japanese are the dharma teachings for which I will always be eternally grateful. They shaped the Buddhism I was taught as well as my life as a practitioner; they were teachings of applied practice within community. In particular, these women taught their multicultural children, and all of their children’s friends, by sharing the dharma in the small spaces of their homes in military bases around the world. These were the sacred spaces of ritual, of transcendence, and of hope as they learned to navigate the various cultures that formed the American military and the populations where the military showed up. These gatherings formed the basis for the diversity that was Nichiren Shoshu of America, now SGI, which since its formal beginnings in the 1960s has maintained a consistently diverse community. Similar stories exist with respect to the Jodo Shinshu, Jodo Shu, and the Nichiren Shu, as well as various other Asian-based communities whose beginnings predated the early 1900s.

Because of my own history and the way I came to Buddhism, my practice has always been about faith and the development and application of faith. I was taught spiritual uplift and transcendence as important products of faith, driven by elements of practice geared toward awakening one’s senses. I assumed for a long time that all Buddhists felt the same way. It was a while before I learned that many meditation-centric practitioners, who have long dominated the known landscape of Buddhism in the West, had deemed the rituals and traditions of Buddhism as cultural baggage, superstitious practices with little value for sophisticated, intelligent modern meditators. Often, this “baggage” has been thrown away with little reflection or understanding of its purpose.

When these conversations happen, they are dominated by the assumption that the unifying bond and essential practice among Buddhists is sitting, silent meditation, which marginalizes the experience of millions of Buddhists in the West, not to mention billions of Buddhists throughout history.

Aside from the obvious problems of such flippancy, this dismissive attitude toward certain forms of Buddhist practice has led to an insularity that is ultimately harmful to embracing a truly diverse Western sangha. And in the same vein but on the other side of the divide, those practitioners based in ritual and tradition have also tended to congregate in closed communities, open only to those willing to wholeheartedly adopt ritual and tradition and to fully adapt to the cultural imperatives of those communities.

For most practitioners, what makes us Buddhist is taking refuge in the three treasures: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. This is the culture that we have come to accept as fundamental. Unfortunately, while there have been efforts to gather together as diverse practitioners, we have not really engaged in the conversations centered on our commonalities— or rather, when these conversations happen, they are dominated by the assumption that the unifying bond and essential practice among Buddhists is sitting, silent meditation, which marginalizes the experience of millions of Buddhists in the West, not to mention billions of Buddhists throughout history. Instead of seeking what truly binds us as a common group of practitioners, we have developed a level of closed-mindedness about the validity of the various Buddhist schools. We are more likely to take up interfaith activities with Abrahamaic traditions, for instance, than to interact with the assorted traditions under the umbrella of Buddhism.

So while most of us have awakened to the need to experience the richness that diverse communities bring to us, we have failed to consider the ways in which our communities are already diverse and have always been so. We are diverse not only in our ethnicities and root origins but also in our histories, our practices, our source texts, our goals, and our purpose in being Buddhist. Some of us seek only a technique for living without really accessing the dharma behind it; others seek the experience of transcendence provided by ritual and tradition. Still others are deeply concerned about and engaged in sharing the dharma to bring peace and harmony to the world. These differences reflect a great deal about the adaptability of Buddhism, its appeal to diverse communities, and its ability to offer refuge to anyone seeking it. Such differences also reflect the manner in which practitioners have been able to develop over the long term and maintain a practice that retains its heart while adapting to a different landscape.

There is room for all of us in the wonderful net that is Buddhism in the West, and our ability to develop and maintain harmony with each other is important to the spread of the dharma. Our world demands action from all sorts of communities, including Buddhists, and our conversations and questions about these issues would clearly represent a significant and positive point of departure if we would simply interact and learn from each other.

Chapter 5 of the Lotus Sutra suggests an essential perspective that we may consider developing within ourselves:

I see all living beings equally.

I have no partiality for them.

There is not “this one” or “that one” to me.

I transcend love and hatred.

Further, there is a concept that Nichiren Shonin (1222– 1282), founder of the Nichiren school, wrote about known as itai doshin [many in body, one in mind], which suggests the following:

If itai doshin prevails among the people, they will achieve all their goals, whereas in dotai ishin [one in body, different in mind], they can achieve nothing remarkable.

There need not be a competitive spirit among the Buddhist communities of the West. We have a great deal to learn from each other, and we have each met the dharma that is suitable for us where we are. There is not one valid approach to the practice of the buddhadharma: Deep insight and understanding can be gained from the type of critical examination and questioning that is endemic to Western ways of thinking. But practice without deep intellectual understanding can also provide a profound capture of the essence of the dharma, especially when one seeks simply to live the very best life of which one is capable. The process of giving oneself over to the beauty of ritual and tradition especially allows entry into transcendence, thus alleviating the suffering of daily life. Combined, these two approaches may lead to a deeper, more nuanced, and simply a more solid vessel to “cross the sea of suffering.”

The gifts we receive as dharma practitioners may increase our desire and our obligation to share our path with others. By uniting with all practitioners as a collective community of compassion—exactly what is needed in the world we currently inhabit—we may create a world in which we can all have hopes and dreams. 

The post The Great Divide appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Our lives begin to end the day we are silent about things that matter.

–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Many of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s beliefs—the value of nonviolence, the power of love to transform our world, and the interconnectedness of all beings—are consonant with the Buddhist teachings. Today, where we face the ugly forces of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and ignorance in both public discourse and our private lives, Dr. King’s vision can provide a lodestar that guides us toward a world where we treat one another with compassion despite differences.

In celebration of Martin Luther King Day, we’re sharing a video dharma talk and five articles about the intersection of race and Buddhism in our world. We hope that they serve to edify, motivate, and inspire you toward a deeper understanding of where we’ve been—and how far we have go to—for racial justice in our nation.

Waking up to Racism by bell hooks
Examining the racism that can prevent people of color from calling the dharma their own

Does Race Matter in the Meditation Hall?
Vipassana teacher Gina Sharpe talks to Tracy Cochran about a Buddhist retreat for people of color

A Sangha by Another Name by Charles Johnson
The first noble truth as it applies to the suffering of blacks in white America, and the history of dharma among black artists

Real Refuge: Building Inclusive and Welcoming Sanghas with Mushim Patricia Ikeda-Nash
How accessible and culturally supportive are our sanghas for people of all races, sexual orientation, income levels, and ages seeking the dharma?

Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
A Buddhist priest reflects on the occasion of the civil rights leader’s birthday.

Trike Daily: Presenting “Teachings for Uncertain Times”
During February’s Black History Month, Tricycle will run a special series of video dharma talks—featuring 13 Buddhist teachers of color—on topics such as Black Lives Matter lovingkindness meditation, seeing America’s racial karma as samsara, and taking refuge amidst personal and societal suffering.

The post Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Vision for a Unified World appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This weekend, more than 400 people are expected to travel to western New York for a celebration honoring Rochester Zen Center’s 50th anniversary.

The center, started in 1966 by Roshi Philip Kapleau [1912-2004], is among the oldest Buddhist meditation centers in the United States. The anniversary weekend is expected to draw former Zen center members from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, many of whom haven’t visited in many years.

Below, Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede, who has served as abbot of Rochester Zen Center since 1986, talks about the center’s changes under his leadership, how Zen in America has changed since then, and what he hopes to see happen in the next 50 years.

—Wendy Joan Biddlecombe, Web Editor

Tell me about when you transitioned to the role of abbot. What do you remember most about that time? 
There were a lot of growing pains; a lot was happening in those first 20 years. In these last 30 since I’ve been the abbot, things have settled down a lot.

In 1986 I was getting my footing. I had some big shoes to fill with Roshi Kapleau having preceded me, and I had to find my own way. I am forever grateful to what he provided here, but we’re not the same. He was 35 years older than me and had been imprinted with his Japanese training quite a bit. When he asked me to take over I said, “Yes, but I’m going to have to make some changes.” And he agreed. One of those changes I saw early on was to make the center less Japanese. He was always clear that we had to Americanize Zen just as the Japanese had Japanized it and the Koreans had Koreanized it when it came to those cultures.

But it’s a much bigger leap. Those three major Zen countries in Asia share a Confucian ethos. Confucian means, for example, hierarchical. And I recognized that this is not a perfect fit for Americans. Yes, there’s a place for hierarchy and for seniority, but we also had to acknowledge that Americans are much more oriented to egalitarianism. So that was one of the early changes I made. I can’t actually tell you right now how I did it!

How has the residential training program changed over the years? 
When I took over there was still a fairly strong martial quality to the everyday residential trainings here as well as the sesshins [retreats]. And I came to feel that it was also just a little too much for Americans. Having spent just six months in training in Japan, I came to see how much of what I thought was Zen was actually Japanese!

I came back from Japan with more clarity about what we should hold on to in the way of traditional forms and what we could let go of. I would have to say that it’s a kinder and gentler Zen center than it was under Roshi Kapleau. He had his own kindness, but it was wrapped in a more fierce quality.

We have never done monastic training in the traditional sense; we don’t have people who have taken lifelong vows of celibacy. We’ve followed the Japanese way, which is that once you become ordained, then you still have the option of getting married. The residential training here is kind of a semi-monastic style. One of the things we’ve struggled with for 50 years is how to integrate the residential training with the parish quality of the larger membership. So we have maybe 450 members, but only 20 to 25 are living in residence and following the schedule full-time.

And when you say you struggle, you mean that you would like to see the number of people living in residence go up?
Yes. Residential training has always been my own affinity. It’s what I’ve been doing since I was 22, but it’s simply not for most people. At this time in Buddhism’s history, it’s still largely a householder’s practice. So I wanted to make the opportunity available for people who feel drawn to residential training, but I also need to make the center more like a parish, available to most people.

You mentioned earlier that there were more growing pains in the early years. Why do you think that is? Is it perhaps because Buddhism isn’t the radical new Western phenomenon it was back then?
I suppose with founding any organization there is a lot of learning to do. This may have been especially so for Roshi Kapleau because he had been out of the country for 13 years in Japan and had to get reacquainted with his native country and shed some of the unnecessary Asian elements.

But then in those first 20 years we had a lot more young people. When I first came here and got started almost all of us were in our early 20s. And now there are many more gray hairs in dharma centers than there used to be. And so with all these young restless people from the drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll scene there was a lot more going on here temperamentally—they were still playing out family issues and father issues with Roshi Kapleau. And now I think it’s a much more mature sangha. Not just with age, because about a third of our membership includes people younger than 40.

It’s hard to have a conversation about the state of Buddhism in America without addressing the mindfulness movement. Has the popularity of mindfulness changed the people who are coming to the Rochester Zen Center?
Yes. About seven times a year we have daylong introductory workshops. And what we’ve seen in the last couple years is that more people coming to these workshops have some experience in meditation. A lot of them are more versed in the vocabulary of mindfulness and have been exposed to mindfulness. But then what I have to do is make clear—maybe not explicitly—the difference between secular mindfulness and Buddhist meditation.

In Buddhism we have the eightfold path, and the seventh and eighth steps are right mindfulness and right concentration. If I’m asked to compare Zen meditation with secular mindfulness, I will sometimes say that mindfulness is just one of seven elements of the path and that Zen is something where concentration is given equal importance to mindfulness. I’ll point out that what I don’t see in secular mindfulness is anything about awakening. The experience of awakening—not just for oneself but for the sake of all beings. The bodhisattva vows are also paramount. We can’t be doing meditation just for ourselves. If there’s any purpose to this meditation, it’s to help and be of service to others.

But I am delighted that the practice of mindfulness has become so widespread. I really am. I mean, who wouldn’t want more people in this world practicing mindfulness?

Sanghas across the United States have been working to become more inclusive. Can you tell me about how your center is addressing diversity?
The lack of diversity is a thorny issue that we’ve struggled with and is something I know that other Zen centers have struggled with as well. It’s something we have racked our brains with here in Rochester. I continue to ponder how we can attract more people of color. I think the number one thing is for people of color to see people of color at a center, but how do you get that started? We’ve tried different things, we’ve experimented, we’ve done more outreach, but we still have only a handful of members who are black, for instance. An ongoing thing in our agenda is to figure out what we can do about it. The problem we always face is that there’s no place in Zen for recruitment. This is one of the traditional features of Zen that I think is valuable. We don’t want to go out and recruit people. We want people to initiate their interest in the center. In spite of that we did some outreach, putting up posters in black communities, which we’ve never done anywhere else. So how do you find that balance? That’s one of these koans that I continue to face. It’s an open question.

What do you hope the state of American Zen will be 50 years from now? 
I would want everyone in the world practicing either Zen or some other kind of Buddhist meditation. It’s the secret to life and the ultimate resource to finding our way. Coming to terms with our lives and our deaths is practicing meditation. So, I hope it comes to appeal to more and more people, and I would love to see more people drawn to monastic or residential training, because there’s no substitute for it. There are very few people at Chapin Mill [Rochester Zen Center’s rural retreat center] right now. It’s used primarily for our sesshins, which draw between 50 and 60 people. But then when people go home there’s a skeleton crew left there. And there’s so much land and so many resources there that I would love to see the community grow and have more people doing residential trainings.

Rochester Zen Center’s 50th anniversary celebration continues this fall. Jon Kabat-Zinn is scheduled to give the 50th anniversary lecture on October 15.

The post A More Mature Sangha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Over the summer holiday, my son became bilingual.

That’s probably not technically correct, but that’s certainly my experience of what happened. We flew to the United States in August—our first family trip home in three years—and then, after about a week and a half, Boy started speaking English. Fluently.

Anyone observing our son in his current Japanese context would assume him to be a native speaker of English. Old women passing us on the streets in our neighborhood frequently gasp at his Day-Glo pale skin, his somber cuteness. Some lean in close, pat his head, and try out a few phrases, thinking perhaps this will put him at ease: Hello? Name? How old?

These words are gifts. I know the women are trying to be generous—they are being generous—but it is always exactly the wrong thing to say. He clutches at my legs, refuses to speak, his gaze falling to his shoes.

Often, he doesn’t know what is being said or asked of him. After all, Mama and Papa’s English doesn’t sound like that. “He speaks Japanese,” I explain again and again. “He goes to day care here.” The conversation is always a lost cause from that point on, though. Those kindly old women must think it’s very sweet that I think my boy speaks Japanese.

If pressed, my husband and I would say our son’s first word was “moon”—he screamed “mooooooo!!!” every time that glowing orb appeared in the pages of a picture book, or in the night sky outside his window. But he was saying a lot before that—a garbled mess of nonsense baby talk, or “babbling,” according to the experts. One day, our friend Naomi visited us, and we realized that she understood him.

Koun, my husband, is a translator and an interpreter—and I know enough Japanese to get by in my day-to-day life in Kumamoto—but only Naomi could hear through the mush-mouthed sound that was his first attempt at language: aru (it exists) and nai (it doesn’t exist), the two most essential verbs in the Japanese language.

After that, we started really hearing him, too. There was cho-cho (butterfly), itai (It hurts!), koko (here), iya da (No/I don’t like it!), densha (train), and wanwan (doggie). And then for a time it was mostly just densha, screamed with gusto, over and over, at every possible opportunity, even just at the thought of one.

I know that children’s language skills pick up dramatically in the second year of life. It’s a developmental fact. But I will always wonder when, exactly, this transition from not having to having began for my son. We don’t know because we couldn’t hear him.

After we had returned from our holiday to the United States, Boy had become, for me, an entirely new person. I knew him—deeply knew him—as a person who spoke primarily Japanese, save for a few English words thrown in here and there to fill in missing concepts.

And now I know him as an English speaker almost exclusively—so much so that I often forget that Japanese self of his. I forget that it is there, always, that it is a real and true part of him. And so, I am sometimes shocked into recognition by little things—how he becomes Japanese the moment we enter the gates of his day care center, how he brags to the pizza delivery man about his own superfast motorbike, how he happily chats away to the lady up the street who brings us vegetables from her garden.

Inside the boundaries of our home, I often don’t see my Japanese boy. But sometimes he comes out in a word, a phrase, a mannerism. Occasionally, he turns entirely into his other self. The other day, my husband asked Boy how to say something in Japanese—I don’t remember the word now—but it was a trigger. He was Japanese until bedtime, and the next day, he awoke in English.

What is my son’s authentic self? I think this is what a person might ask if they’d never spent time immersed in another language or culture. It must be hard to believe that a person can truly be more than one person—and not have some kind of serious mental disorder. I think in the West, especially, we want to say a person is like this, or a person is like that. But that can’t tell the whole story.

I have come to understand, sometimes grudgingly, that we are many people, depending on our contexts, on our relationships. I know, for example, that there is a kind of core nature to myself—a set of ethics and patterns that I tend to work from—but who I am at home is probably not exactly who I am at work; who I am talking to my husband is not who I am writing this. And that doesn’t make the concept of me any less authentic in any of those instances. They are all me. And that goes for my kids too. Now our daughter is edging toward 2, toward that magical linguistic window.

We’re not certain this time either, but we think her first word was nai—“It doesn’t exist.”

♦

From Lotus Petals in the Snow: Voices of Canadian Buddhist Women, edited by Tanya McGinnity. Reprinted with permission of The Sumeru Press, www.sumeru-books.com. Copyright 2016 by the author.

The post Authentic Self appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Besides being the author of the book Buddha from the Penguin Lives series, scholar of religions Karen Armstrong has another project that is close to the hearts of Buddhists: the Charter for Compassion. Compassion, Armstrong argues, underlies all the major faiths—much as we Buddhists might like to take credit for it for ourselves!

This month, Tricycle is partnering with the Compassionate Action Network to support Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion and Compassionate Cities Project—which we’re discussing on the site. Join us today at any member level and you’ll have the opportunity to sign the Charter, make a $5 donation to the Compassionate Action Network, and to download a free chapter Karen Armstrong’s new book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.

Here is an excerpt, in which she describes what we may think of as the birth of compassion:

As human beings became more secure, achieved greater control over their environment, and began to build towns and cities, some had the leisure to explore the interior life and find ways of controlling their destructive impulses. From about 900 to 200 BCE, during what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” there occurred a religious revolution that proved pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. In four distinct regions, sages, prophets, and mystics began to develop traditions that have continued to nourish men and women: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism on the Indian subcontinent; Confucianism and Daoism in China; monotheism in the Middle East; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. This was the period of the Upanishads, the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Ezra, Socrates, and Aeschylus. We have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age. In times of spiritual and social crisis, people have repeatedly turned back to it for guidance. They may have interpreted the Axial discoveries differently, but they never succeeded in going beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all latter-day flowerings of this original vision, which they translated marvelously into an idiom that spoke directly to the troubled circumstances of a later period. Compassion would be a key element in each of these movements.

Join us today to read more and support the compassionate work of Karen Armstrong.

The post Karen Armstrong on the Birth of Compassion appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.